Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill. As the Minister of State and everyone around the country knows, even in areas where there was never a problem with rents, it is becoming a problem. Even in small towns where three, four or five years ago there was not a problem, it is now a problem to get a house. Thankfully, we see some families moving to such areas, which is welcome. However, that is putting on added pressure because there are not enough houses.

We have seen projects in the councils where, for one reason or another, not enough power was put behind them, such as at Oscar Traynor Road, which was to be done, and done again, but it keeps being put off. I am not blaming the Minister of State. I remember that, eight or ten years ago, one Minister got all the councillors together and it still fell back.

There is one solution to rent and RPZs, and that is to get houses built. The Minister of State will be familiar with the current situation where there could be projects for 12,000 or 13,000 houses caught up in the courts due to people objecting, which is a major problem. Some of this has to be fizzled out. Everyone now thinks they can shoot to the courts and basically block whatever housing is coming near their area. Everything is granted so long as it in someone else's area but not at my back door. Some of the decisions I have seen would cause anyone to raise an eyebrow. There might be some wording left out in some bit of a document and the whole housing plan would still be held up. The other part is that it takes bodies like An Bord Pleanála so long that we would wonder if anyone at all is working there at the moment. The Galway outer bypass has been before the board for I do not know how many years; someone is looking at it but, every month, it is kicked down the road. It is the same in housing.

One thing we need to do is to call a housing emergency, put legislation through, get the stuff built that we need to get built, and get it done rapidly. There is another thing we need to do for renters and for families. If people are on €30,000, or €26,000 to €27,000 in County Galway, they are not eligible for social housing but they cannot afford a house. However, if they are in Dublin, the limit is €35,000. That is saying that someone in Dublin can earn more money and still be entitled to a house whereas, in counties Galway and Roscommon, or maybe County Kildare for that matter, the Ceann Comhairle’s area, they would not be entitled to it. There needs to be a bit of levelling off. A house is a house, and people earn what they earn, no matter where they are. The days where this is acceptable are gone. There are parts of County Galway where a house is as dear as parts of Dublin, unfortunately, for the people trying to buy them or rent them. The Department needs to look at the eligibility criteria.

Given what we are doing at the moment, those in middle Ireland who are going out to work every day are being pushed out of being able to rent a house or, further down the road, afford a house. At one time, a nurse and a garda, no matter where they were in the country, were able to afford a house, but they would want mummy and daddy to give them a bit of a pot to be able to afford a house now. That society will not continue because that society is not sustainable.

The one thing we need to do is make sure we drive the number of houses on, which will solve the whole rental problem. It is like anything else. If someone has a heap of cattle, the factories will make sure they do not get much of a price, but if the person has damn all, the price will go up. That is a very simple analogy.

There is a huge opportunity in this regard. In many rural areas, there are old two-storey houses that were built of stone and many of them vacant, but we are not giving any incentives to people. Where people are eligible for HAP, for example, they could be given extra money to do up a house and, for the time being, we would be taking someone off a list.

Another issue is that some people have this idea that mummy and daddy are over the road so they are entitled to a house right beside them. We need to bring in a system where, if a person is prepared to go somewhere up or down the country, regardless of where they are from, and to take a house for the time being, they would get moved up the list a bit after a year or two. That would give an incentive. It is done in England. I have been saying this for a long time but no one in the Department seems to want to listen.

To go back to the issue of houses in rural areas, there is one worrying aspect. To be fair, the Minister of State is from a rural area and I ask him to make sure he keeps an eye on this. The new county development plans are coming out in many counties at the moment. I see that, for Galway, there are to be 945 one-off houses over a five-year period. In my opinion, given the size of Galway, the second-biggest county in Ireland, that is curtailing building. What do we want? Do we want a person to build a house there or do we want them to go and put more pressure on the rental sector? There are a lot of different avenues that we need to look at in this regard.

The other side to it is that the Minister of State's Department and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science must work together. With the establishment of the new technological universities, some of them should grasp the opportunity and show a bit of entrepreneurship. They should not sit on their hands. Many of them have a lot of land and they need to go out to the market and get the funding. They can do that because they have a sure bet. They are sure they will have students every year and sure of getting rent, which must be set at an affordable price as well. There is an opportunity there, but the question that might be asked then is what that point has got to do with this issue. The answer is that every student living on campus or in accommodation beside a college, for those institutions that have land, takes pressure off some other part of a city or large town where someone else might need a house. We must consider this side of things as well to ensure that we facilitate it.

I am not going to stay talking all day, another minute or two will do because Deputy Durkan wants to contribute as well, but I ask the Minister of State to examine aspects such as the rural issue that I am on about. We have a regulator that seems to be looking in on what every council is doing. We are in an emergency and I do not understand why anyone would say to Galway County Council, or any other county council for that matter, that it can only put such a quota on the rural one-off housing allowed in a county. For the next five to ten years, every house we can build in this country is a problem solved for some family. It could also help to solve a problem in an area where there is ferocious pressure on housing now by reducing that as well, such as in the big cities where people are paying astronomical rents.

We can bring in all the Bills in the world that we want, but that will do no good if we do not do things that are the low-hanging fruit in this area, such as allowing houses to be built in the countryside, renovating older houses lying idle in many areas and basically driving on the whole planning side of things so that it becomes a less complicated process. Unfortunately, the planning system depends an awful lot on what county people are living in. I will comment on one council now, and this is factual. If people bought a house in Wicklow or Kerry years ago, lived there for a while and then sold that house to return home to take up farming or whatever, those people will not be approved for planning permission because they owned a house previously. That is some set-up in a council. The planners doing that seem to have a total disregard for circumstances. People will hardly drive from Kerry to go to look at sheep lambing or cows calving in another county. Those people are not coming home to build a house for the craic.

There needs to be some accountability. In some planning authorities there does not seem to be any. It is possible to see in one county, and they are all going by the book and let no one say that any of them are different, stipulations concerning how to go about resolving issues, but then another planning authority will tell people to forget about it, head out the door and good luck. If we maintain attitudes like that, then we are going to stop people and disgust them. We will then have more debates here about housing. This is about my 100th debate on housing and we still have the same common denominators arising for the simple reason that we are not building enough houses. The planning system also needs a major overhaul.

In addition, we must reconsider this idea of telling someone in a rural area that they must show they are from there and that they are going to be going farming or doing X, Y and Z. I am not saying that every Tom, Dick and Harry should be able to come into the countryside to build, but let us take the example of someone who owned a house when he or she was younger, perhaps after going to college and then working in another county, in Kerry, for example. If that person then decides that he or she wants to come to the west or the east of the country, and because that person is honest enough to say that he or she had previously owned a house and then sold it because he or she does not want to be driving 200 miles, the planning authority will tell the person that it is not possible to build because of the provisions of the county development plan. Whenever there is a situation where that is the case, the Minister must move in and start to redress the situation.

See this speech in context